Originally
posted by
DerrickICN:
You know what's funny to me? And maybe it's just this is the 70th time this has happened so I don't really really care, but fluff man. That PCI conversation is essential to me being able to teach casher as a strat. It's essentially "go by feel" right now because the PCI growth formula is actually lost, and only very elite players can compete with FFO on the one other strat that works currently as a result.
The PCI growth formula doesn't even matter because startups don't matter anymore. You will have equilibrium PCI more or less for 99% of the turns of the round.
We all know the PCI formula and thus we can calculate the income/turn per acre of a rep/theo/demo casher after food expenses. PCI growth formula will only really limit PCI growth beyond just the equilibrium for maybe 50 turns per round and only if you make a very low acreage switch or are agressively trying to push your income up very early.
As far as I know the known parts of the PCI growth formula govern PCI growth in all scenarios other than walling.
The expenses scale exponentially with military units but the cost of a point of NW is the same when you oil destock to 200m 800m or 6000m NW. This is fundamentally why FFO is the only strat that can consistently compete on long servers.
Buy 6 turrets on Alpha and your expenses become $1. Instead buy 6 billion turrets and your expenses are now 20 billion or something, so each turret now costs 20 times as much to maintain. This is quite unrealistic, if that matters, but more crucially as the NW potential rises above a few hundred million it makes CI and any endgame that takes turns quickly unfeasible.
If you think about it a Commie indy actually outproduce an FFO on a NW to land basis as max tech CI produce about 2.4 NW of jets per acre per turn, plus tax revenues minus the basic non-military expenses equal to about 0.4 NW while cashing. So we are talking 2.8 NW per turn and acre. This is nearly what a casher makes if he buy military on private market for all his income each turn.
For FFO that number depends on the prices at hand but we are generally closer to 1.8 NW.
Humanitarians, the extra bonus boost FFOs have also make a difference. But those need not enter the conversation as long as we have the current expense fomula.
Tl;dr the oil destock is a weak way to finish until the exponential expenses destroy every other way to gain NW.